Emel Mathlouthi
آمال المثلوثي
Musician
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Tunisia
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New York,
United States
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✓ Verified
Tunisian singer songwriter whose protest anthem “Kelmti Horra” became one of the defining songs of the Arab Spring.
Emel Mathlouthi started writing songs as a teenager in a Tunis suburb, drawn first to metal and gothic rock before finding her way back to the Arabic vocal tradition she grew up around. That collision of influences gave her an early sound that few Tunisian labels knew what to do with, so she left for Paris to make it herself.
Her song “Kelmti Horra,” meaning “my word is free,” had already been circulating quietly for years when the Tunisian revolution began in 2010. Sung by protesters in the streets of Tunis, it became one of the era’s defining anthems, and Mathlouthi later performed it at the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.
Subsequent albums, including “Ensen” and “Everywhere We Looked Was Burning,” have pushed further into electronic production without losing the raw, single voice quality that made her name, a body of work that treats revolution as a beginning rather than a finished subject.
Languages
Arabic, English, French
Representation
Independent